Syria: Drums of war deafen us to history's lessons

Conventional artillery can be every bit as devastating to human bodies as chemical weapons. Here a wounded man carries a boy after government shelling in Aleppo, Syria. (Aug. 16, 2013)

By:Noah Richler Published on Fri Sep 06 2013

So here we go again, government and media revving up the people for another bloody conflict.

“This is not Iraq, this is not Afghanistan,” says U.S. President Barack Obama of the plan he is taking to Congress for a cruise missile strike against Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime, as the United Nations rushes to determine if allegations of chemical weapons use are true. The “military action,” not an act of war, Obama insists, is “proportional, it is limited, it does not involve boots on the ground.” The United States must respond if the superpower is to be perceived as the “world leader” it is.

The Republicans appear to be coming around and so, too, are important bastions of the press. There’s a Washington Post article circulating on the web these days entitled “9 Questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask.” It’s a sort of Syria-for-Dummies guide and something of a formula for the newspaper (it follows an earlier “9 Questions about Egypt” published in mid-August) and yet another symptom of just how dangerously glib we have become in the way we talk about war.

The Post article offers dinner party conversation points. It talks about lobbing “a few cruise missiles (that don’t) cost us much,” not even intended to “turn the tide” of the Syrian war and “not supposed to.” It provides a summary who’s who, chucks in a Syrian pop video for good measure — hell, what’s any news today without a YouTube music video? And then, a throwaway easily ignored, it suggests that sometime down the road, when once again no one in the U.S. or Canada actually gives a toss, “the world could maybe send in some peacekeepers.”

How have we reached the point where such a monumental political decision is marked without protests in the streets but governed by articles measuring their success in user hits and likes and social networking shares? Let’s pause to think just a little about the astonishing language that, for instance, the president’s ally Nancy Pelosi used as she gunned for the “few cruise missiles” that will apparently have “limited” effect. (Really? Have we learned nothing from 9/11?)

“People say (Assad) killed a hundred thousand people,” said Pelosi, the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives. “What’s the difference with this 1,400? With this 1,400, he crossed a line with using chemical weapons” — i.e., according to the preposterous logic of war that we regard as civilized, killing 100,000 people slowly and by conventional means is OK. Bleeding to death, having your body severed or blown to smithereens by explosive devices or having a building fall on you — well, that’s fine, that’s how wars are fought. The United States will let you. Action is unwarranted and no newspaper guide to dinner party talking points is necessary. But chemical weapons? No! We object!

Now, I’d hazard, at no great intellectual risk, that whether by chemicals or bombs or bullets, the end result of death as experienced by the victim and afterwards the dead person’s families, is the same. Misery. Loss. Outrageous pain. A lust for revenge, some would call it “justice,” and to be counted. Really, the key to understanding our sudden capacity for action lies in the assurance that inbound cruise missiles won’t “cost us much” and Obama’s that the military operation — this, despite the careful wording of his plan to Congress to the contrary — will not involve “boots on the ground.”

We must be honest with ourselves: launching cruise missiles without the authority of the United Nations is not an act of policing, a penalty for crossing some red line, but an act of war and we should be prepared for everything that means. The increasingly insignificant marker of “boots on the ground” — wars are now fought by geeks behind computers in a faraway desert piloting unmanned drones — is only relevant in terms of the cost we foresee being felt by us, at home, in living rooms that a mere dozen years after 9/11 we fundamentally believe to be safe and beyond the reach of recriminatory, violent steps that other peoples might consider moral and legitimate. Without UN sanction, this is a very dangerous game to play.

Mine is not an argument for inaction. It is not a feeble pacifist’s empty complaint. It is a plea to consider the language we use; how it makes certain political outcomes acceptable, and the alternative possibilities that it negates. This country’s very successful opponents of Canadian participation in UN-brokered peace operations made gleeful maxims of the apparent naïveté of dispatching Canadian soldiers in blue helmets to places “where there’s no peace to keep,” and now here we are arguing an equally fallacious opposite: that cruise missiles can be launched without us committing to war. For us to have arrived at a point where we imagine that one country or a limited alliance launching cruise missiles against a foreign regime is not just that is self-deluding insanity. And if this is our choice then we should have the gumption to declare war and, using clear and appropriate language, make the grim case for it.

But have we learned nothing from history? Is it not better to find a way forward such as the UN provides, that has at least the ideal of diminishing the violence rather than contributing to it? Why are we not acting determinedly and forcefully and committing, with all its problems, to the United Nations that America did so much to found? Why are we not putting some of the energy and enormous resources that make our blithe attitude to cruise missiles possible, into making peace operations credible again? Delegation is also an act of leadership.

Noah Richler is the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About War, nominated for the 2012 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing.

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